Aaron Elkins - Dying on the Vine

The young man tipped the bottle to his mouth and took an alarmingly long swig.

“What do you want to bet that isn’t cough medicine?” John whispered—they were getting close to hearing range. “I don’t think it’s booze either. This guy isn’t drunk, he’s totally stoned. Wired. Baked. Probably got it mixed with something—coke, that’d be my guess.”

“I don’t know. Seems to have stopped his cough.”

They had to pass within a few feet of the table to get into the villa, and they nodded at the couple. The woman responded with an abstracted nod, the young man, no longer coughing but seemingly trying to head off another spell of it, stared blankly at them, hand pressed flat to his chest, not registering anything.

“Did you see the guy’s eyes?” John asked as they entered the villa.

Gideon nodded. “Pupils twice their normal size, whites of his eyes—what there was of them—more red than white.”

“Stoned,” John said again.

In the hallway they ran into Luca heading from the winery building to the north wing, where Vino e Cucina was being held in the great kitchen. Head down, he was shaking his head and mumbling to himself.

“Luca?” Gideon said. “What’s wrong?”

Luca stopped, startled, so buried in his thoughts that he hadn’t been aware of them. “Ah, it’s that miserable, sneaky, two-faced . . . it’s Cesare, goddamn him.”

“What’d he do?” John asked.

“He’s suing us, can you believe it? Suing Franco, anyway, which means we could lose the damn winery.” He jerked his head and grumbled a little more to himself. “He walks in out of nowhere with his lawyer, and calmly informs us he’s going to sue us. Well, not so calmly, I guess.”

“What’s he suing you about?” Gideon asked.

“Ah, who knows? I didn’t understand it all, but I think he thinks that he was going to inherit all this money from his mother, which she would have inherited from babbo , except that he killed her first—which I still don’t buy, by the way—and therefore deprived him of it . . . I don’t know, something like that, they lost me there. I have to go, I’m already late.”

Gideon grabbed his arm. “Wait, hold on a second, Luca, there’s something you need to know.”

Luca paused.

“Luca . . . I’m not so sure your father did kill Nola. Some of the evidence seems to suggest—”

“What?” Luca was staring at him. “How do you know? When did you get involved? What’s going on, Gideon? What—” He shook his head. “No, dammit, I have to go. Look, Franco and Nico are still in the small conference room; you know where it is. Severo too. If you’ve really got something, go and tell them, will you? I’ll find out about it later.”

“Wait just one more second,” Gideon said. He pointed through one of the windows that lined the corridor. “Is that him out there?” The two were still sitting at the table, and the young man was tipping the bottle to his mouth again.

Luca looked and growled. “Yeah, that’s him, the little . . . Gotta go.” And off he hurried.

In the conference room, Severo, Franco, and Nico were huddled over the table immersed in whispered conversation. The door was open, but John knocked on it anyway.

Franco turned, looking displeased. “ Si ?” It was not an invitation.

“Franco,” Gideon said, “we were just talking to Luca—”

“Gideon, could this possibly wait? We’ve got something important going here and—”

“Luca told us about Cesare’s suit, Franco. I thought you’d want to know that I’ve been looking at some of the evidence, and in my opinion there’s some doubt—serious doubt—about whether Nola was actually killed by your father.” He spoke in English, wanting to make sure that he wasn’t misunderstood.

The three men, Severo, Franco, and Luca, all stared uncomprehendingly at the newcomers. Severo was the first to surface. He gestured at the empty chairs. “Come, come in. Ah, perhaps you would . . .”

Franco cut him off. “I don’t understand,” he said to them as they sat. “What are you saying?”

“He’s saying,” John said, “that some pretty strange things have come up that make us think that maybe your father wasn’t the murderer after all, that maybe somebody else killed him and your stepmother.”

“I knew it!” Nico exclaimed, coming half out of his seat, hands flat on the table. “Didn’t I tell you? Oh, Gideon, that’d be great, that’d be so—” He clapped a hand to his forehead. “Jeez, did I just say what I think I said? I didn’t mean—”

“We know what you mean,” Franco said, “and I assure you we all feel exactly the same way. If it can be shown that babbo did not kill her, then Cesare has no case whatever. Gideon, what—?”

Nico interrupted, showing a rare flash of anger. “No, that’s what you would have meant, Franco, that’s not what I meant. I meant that for me the fact that babbo’s dead is bad enough, but the idea that he was a murderer—that was almost too damn much too to bear.” Tears glistened at the rims of his eyes. “But if it turns out that it wasn’t that way at all, that he didn’t kill anybody—including himself—that would throw a whole new . . . ah, the hell with it, it’s too much to take in,” he finished weakly. He fell back in his chair, and covered his eyes with his hand.

It was a surprise to Gideon, an unmistakably real display of emotion from Nico, who was usually so lazily affable.

“Are you finished, Nico?” Franco asked coldly. When Nico responded with no more than a listless wave, he turned to Gideon and John. “Now, what is this all about?” He glanced up at the doorway, where Luca had shown up a little out of breath. “What are you doing here? How are your faithful disciples getting along without their guru?”

“I changed the schedule. They’re taking the winery tour now instead of tomorrow. Linda’s showing them around. I told her to make it last.” He took the one remaining chair, next to Quadrelli. “So. What’s going on? Gideon said—”

“Gideon said that babbo didn’t kill anybody. We’re waiting for the explanation.”

“No,” Gideon said, “let’s get that straight before we go any further. I didn’t say that your father didn’t kill anybody, and I’m not saying it now. What I said was that some questions have arisen that tend to confuse—”

“No,” said Nico, “you said that you had some serious doubt that—”

“No, you said more than that.” Luca said. “You said that you didn’t think babbo —”

“No,” Luca said, “what he said—”

“Well, whatever the hell I said,” Gideon declared, rather too loudly, “do you want to hear the rest of it or don’t you?” He was annoyed with the whole bunch of them. Here he’d devoted hours of his time to looking into the case, he’d gone out of his way to be careful of their feelings, and now he had something to tell them that could turn out to be of tremendous emotional and financial benefit to them, and what were they doing? They were sitting around like a high school English class, parsing his damn sentences for him.

The tension was cut by Maria’s entrance with a tray of espressos and biscuits and a stern look that said, Drink. Now, before it gets cold . Everybody obediently downed their coffee, and an atmosphere of calm, reasonably good fellowship was restored.

The explanation took a long time. To start with, Gideon had to explain his involvement in the case by way of the forensic seminar, and to (not very successfully) justify his keeping it from them until now. Then there was the matter of making it clear how the accepted murder-suicide scenario was muddied by his conclusions that Nola had been shot after the fall had already killed her, and that Pietro would have had to clamber back up the cliff afterward to shoot himself.